Stop Spammer

As I posted recently, all wordpress blogs I’m involved with have been seeing lots of spam: Comment Spam, User Registration Spam, and Login Hacks. Here’s a log from the Stop Spammer WordPress plugin showing the last hour of login attempts at the iRez blog. As you can see it’s a lot of “weak” lowercase passwords applied against the “admin” account (which, fortunately, doesn’t even exist)

Stop Spammer

In my recent “Delete Your Admin Account” post, I noted the steady stream of login attemts, most often against the username “Admin” on numerous WordPress blogs that I’m involved with. The highest traffic, and hence the most spamified of these blogs is iRez, and so I recently installed the “Stop Spammer” plugin there.

I’ve been seeing many different types of spam in high frequency:
• Attempts to login as Admin, or Root, etc
• Spam User Registrations
• Spam Comments

The comment and trackback spam is to get links to whatever site a person or bot is promoting. The login hacks, well who knows what mayhem that might lead to. The Spam User Registrations are kind of puzzling as I don’t see what they could accomplish. At least the blogs I’m involved with, you don’t have to be a “user” to leave a comment, so the spam registration isn’t required to leave a spam comment, and registration as a “Subscriber-level user” doesn’t come with any sort of power on the blog. I haven’t been able to dig up a “Why?” for this, so the temporary answer is simply that bots are made to crawl and stick their bot-fingers in every crack they find and so they do.

The Stop Spammer plugin works on many different issues, (read the documentation) and as you can see in the printout above, we have a steady stream of, I presume, bot login attacks, that listing just from an hour.